Easy Animator

[Panther]

A long time ago, in ... well, a long time ago, I punched in a simple little BASIC program from Antic Magazine that would simply let you type characters and then it would repeat them back. Especially with the ATASCII character set, this allowed for some animation. I showed this to my sister who then started playing with it and then after some time wanted to show me her creation. Then she asked me how to save it... a function not included. I got to work. Eventually I had something that my sister could use to save her animations. It didn't stop there. Eventually I had something that was actually quite useful, especially for things such as my BBS login screen. I called it "Easy Animator". For any who might care, this is the latest version that I'd managed to locate on my few surviving Atari 8-bit disks. I've also included an animation I did at the time when testing it.

 

A few instructions:

• While displaying, Space pauses and unpauses, Escape exits display.
• Use Append to create a new animation or add to the end of an existing one.
• While editing (including append), Select goes back one character, Start exits edit mode.
• Disabling sound drastically speeds up animation display.

Toggle margins to 38 columns (40 columns is the default) when displaying the sample animation "Bank".
I added the extension ".TXT" to the animations since the forum wouldn't allow me to upload files without an extension.

 

ANIMAT21.BAS

BANK.TXT

TITLE.TXT

[Panther]

Another BASIC program, called "The Alphabetizer", which I used to keep track of my collection of files. It just lets you add to a text file with the capability of sorting it alphabetically, and optionally printing it.

 

ALPHASRT.BAS

[Panther]

Due to the overwhelming response to Easy Animator on this thread, I've rewritten the entire program in assembly.  Attached is the new version, through besides the added help menu and the removed file management commands, it's otherwise identical.

 

EasyAnim.com

Edited January 20, 2022 by Panther

[Ricky Spanish]

Cool ! Very cool !

[Panther]

Glad someone thinks so (my previous post was sarcasm obviously)!  A number of people in the Los Angeles area back in the day, but I don't think it made it any further.  I did the rewrite just to learn about writing assembly programs for the Atari.